Guns and Schools

Full disclosure. I grew up quasi-rural. A fifteen-minute walk would take me to the hilly countryside west of Valley City. And I grew up a gun owner. My Uncle Bob purchased a .22 Marlin single shot for my third or fourth birthday. When I was about ten, Dad and I would walk into the hills where he began to teach me the fundamentals of gun safety. At the age of 17 I purchased a Ruger Mark I .22 caliber pistol with earnings from bagging groceries.

In other words I have been a gun owner all of my life, with a particular fascination with pistols, their mechanical workings, and the art of trying to hit a target (or a wily gopher) at fifty or sixty feet. Back in those days I never gave a thought to gun ownership as a means of protecting my life and the lives of loved ones. It was unthinkable.

What has changed between then and now? The capacity of guns to fire repeatedly until hundreds of rounds have been spent in a matter of seconds, radically changing the context of gun ownership. People who feel the need to own the civilian counterpart of a high efficiency military weapon could have only two things in mind: killing a lot of people or shooting a deer 103 times in a few seconds. Not sure that deer would be worth either eating or mounting for display. And the hunter is only allowed to take one deer, not an entire herd. Oh I know, the NRA would have you believe there is a big difference, that you have to pull the trigger for each and every shell that is fired. Wow! As if that makes a difference in a classroom of six-year-olds.

Fast-forward nearly half a century. I had the good fortune to serve as a superintendent of a high school district in suburban Chicago about 3/4s of a mile south of Midway Airport. We were tied to the Chicago Public Schools at the hip, on Cicero Avenue. The high school had about 1900 students at the time, divided between Hispanic, Arab, and southern European ethnicities.

On May 20, 1988, all Cook County school districts responded quickly to the Chicago North Shore school shooting, where a mentally deranged 30 year old baby sitter, Laurie Dann, walked into Hubbard Woods Elementary School in Winnetka with a loaded .357 magnum pistol and a .22 cal. Biretta and shot and killed one student and wounded another half dozen. On that day the lives of not only school children in Illinois changed, but also the agendas of superintendents and boards of education. From that day forward, communities demanded to know what schools were doing to keep their children safe. Clearly, the days of schools being open to anyone who chose to enter any of their many doors were over forever.

Concerned about copycat crime, we in our school district met to determine what means and methods could be engaged immediately to decrease the likelihood a tragedy could happen to us. All suggestions had practical consequences. Locking down in excess of 15 entrances to the building would cause students and staff to walk greater distances from games fields to locker rooms for changing before the next class. Parking lots suddenly became a quarter mile from an entrance. Additional staff would need to be hired to monitor access to the building. And then there was the matter of who would protect the students and faculty while they were in the building.

After considerable deliberation with the Board of Education we determined that we would employ a school liaison police officer who would be stationed in the school during the day. As a concession to some board members in order to gain consent for the plan, the officer would be in plain clothes. As a further concession, he would be unarmed, but would be in radio contact with his precinct, less than a half-mile from the school.

Following the implementation of the plan, the Chief of Police, a man I admired much, asked that we meet over lunch for further discussion. The chief’s main concern was that he would have an officer working in a potential crime situation where he would be unable to defend himself and others. He was having second thoughts about the arrangement. He wanted the liaison officer to be armed, if discretely.

I took the concerns to the board president, a very bright and level-headed person, and a graduate of the school himself. We determined that the officer would carry a concealed weapon and that three people would have that knowledge, the chief, the board president, and I.

As it turned out, there were many plusses to having the officer part of the school staff. As a fairly recent graduate of the school he knew a lot of the families whose children attended. As students got to know him through interaction in the lunchrooms and hallways, it became common for students to stop in his main hallway office from time to time to jaw a bit and drop a dime about things going on in the community. Those relationships with students led to the solution of crimes in the area that would otherwise have gone unsolved. Additionally, many students saw him as a positive role model dressed in shirt, tie, and khakis, most always in the hallways joshing the kids, a big smile on his face.

And having an armed officer in a public school? Well, in that day it seemed at least a token equalizer. But against the mayhem of assault weapons, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference, unless the officer was a superb marksman. Six to nine bullets against a clip of 50-75 is a big challenge. But in this day and age I’d be inclined to do it again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Dann